Adobe Flash Player is a proprietary (closed source) and freeware web browser plugin designed to allow users to enjoy rich multimedia and Internet applications powered by the Flash technology.

Supports popular web browsers

Initially developed by the American Macromedia web development software company, the project was previously known as Macromedia Flash. These days it is actively developed by the Adobe Systems and Microsoft Corporation.

It is basically a simple library, a plugin for several well known web browsers, including the powerful Mozilla Firefox application, supporting playback of audio and video streams, as well as to view Flash websites and interact with rich Internet apps.

Getting started with Adobe Flash Player

If you want to install the Adobe Flash Player plugin in your Linux distribution, you’ll have to first to close any opened web browser application and remove previous versions of the Flash plugin from the system.

Next, you will need to download the binary archive and extract its contents in the hidden ~/.mozilla/plugins folder located under your Home directory (create the 'plugins' folder if it doesn’t exist).

Also, you can extract the contents of the binary archive in the /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ folder, as root (system administrator), or install it from the official software channels of your Linux operating system. Alternatively, you can use the provided RPM file or YUM repository for any RPM-based Linux distribution.

The above instructions are for users of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, as the popular Google Chrome software comes with built-in support for Adobe Flash Player.

Supported operating systems

The plugin is known to work on Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, supporting the Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera web browsers.

Chances are that Adobe Flash Player will soon be deprecated in favor of the modern HTML5 web technology that is already used on well known multimedia hosting and streaming websites, such as Google’s YouTube.

Adobe Flash Player was reviewed by Marius Nestor, last updated on February 5th, 2015